from collections import Counter
from string import punctuation

def clean_text(text):
    """Lowercase and remove punctuation from a string."""
    text = text.lower()
    for p in punctuation:
        text = text.replace(p, "")
    return text

def count_words(text):
    """Count unique words in a string."""
    text = clean_text(text)
    words = text.split()
    return Counter(words)